I definitely thought by now we’d have flying cars, robot assistants, and food in pill form. Instead, I’m still trying to figure out how to keep my phone from autocorrecting “ducking.”
We tell our tv to turn on, and then tell it what we want to watch. Our watches tell us our blood pressure and heart rate. We can video chat with people on the other side of the planet. We sent robots to Mars… What more do you want?
I feel like I had pretty realistic expectations but Popular Science told me all the cars would be EVs or Hydrogen powered by now and that’s taking a lot longer than I expected although I do drive a plug in hybrid and have for the last 8 years.
I may have thought that once, but I haven’t thought that again in probably 25 years now.
Also, I don’t think the futurists took into account just how much certain segments of our society would resist it, largely on political and cultural grounds.
I think most people’s minds run a little wild with ideas when they see new technology.
We saw that a lot in the 2000s when people were making all these grand ideas about how it’s all going to change the world – and they did, but most people didn’t understand how long it would take.
I think the same goes for AI today, it will have a great impact on us, but a lot of that will be happening 10+ years into the future. We’re essentially seeing a preview where it can help us with simple tasks like optimising our writing, but it’s not necessarily anything critical.
I mean when you think about it we’re living in a crazy future to someone who was living a hundred years ago. We hold the summation of human knowledge in our hands and can communicate with people in radically different cultures at any time. We can exchange ideas at the flick of a finger and take photos with emotion only painters at the time could capture. We treat flying around in giant metal tubes as a mundane and annoying part of life when flight a hundred years ago was still extremely primitive and sort of treated as a fad or frightening. We don’t have flying cars or live in floating cities but we take a lot of the things we have for granted.
I think we will find the “future” arrives at an exponentially rising rate. It will come falling on us. We have only just felt the first several drops at the leading edge of the waterfall so to speak.
The world stays backwards because that’s what makes the people at the top money.
And they’re in the process of taking it even further back to make sure that that system keeps working the way it does as we are discussing the subject here on Reddit.
On Donald Fagen’s (Steely Dan) solo debut there’s a track called I.G.Y. . It was released in the early eighties and the lyrics are basically what he imagined the future to be when he was a child in the fifties. I first heard it in the late nineties and thought the things he sung about would be a reality by now. All we got in the end were the spandex jackets. They’re nice and all but I’d have preferred New York to Paris in 90 minutes.
That Janet Jackson music video made child me think the future would look like flying cars and we would have furniture like the astro furniture from animal crossing. (Song was something about being nutty for you)
I think we’re living in a really futuristic world right now it’s just it’s not like we expected. Sure, we thought we’d get flying cars and all that jazz but I don’t think a lot of us expected the ridiculous advance of LLMs and other AI models, or some of the smaller amazing tech we’ve got used to because we lived the transition. But like, smart appliances, what cellphones can do… I grew up working with TV production and I remember my parents doing non linear video editing which was a whole room and movement endeavour, before linear video editing software became popular and accessible in the late nineties to early 2000s.
Now people can easily and even automatically edit videos with an app on their phone. Wtf.
And there’s the whole “we live in a dystopia” thing too if you wanted something closer to what futuristic novels told you about. It’s just even though it all happened very, very quickly, we also got to live the transition, so we didn’t notice.
I would write stories in the 90’s with what I thought the world would be like, I got door codes instead of keys right -lived at a few places like that but have door keys again now, also knew things like back porch/ garage beer fridges were still gonna be a thing. I clock in with my finger print at work, but I was hoping by now we would be more advance but not heading straight into a dystopian nightmare, I wanted Star trek kind of world.
We are. It’s just banal to you. You’re the frog in the pot of boiling water and you can’t tell it’s gotten really hot already.
Right now I’m typing on a thing that even the most creative people in 1990 would think it’s far fetched. A touch screen? Fuckin nuts, the data pads on Star Trek didn’t even do that. Hold up, this thing is also a phone!? You needed a com badge on Star Trek to do that and it only communicated with the ship.
We have cars that drive themselves, computer programs that make sense of images, automated everything. 3D print yourself a gun, buy movie tickets while sitting on the toilet. Pretty much all of this was the realm of fantasy only 20 years ago.
Just because we aren’t wearing silver reflective jackets and riding hover boards doesn’t mean we’re not in a ‘futuristic’ world, just means that we’re easily bored and real life isn’t flashy.
It’s weird watching Star Trek TNG they all have their tablets, though. I was halfway through rewatching the series when it occurred to me how futuristic that seemed in 1990.
I mean, we are. If we were born into a cyberpunk society it wouldn’t feel like the future, it’d feel like the present. You have to compare modern day to the past, and you realize just how futuristic it really is.
Imagine trying to explain the internet to someone from the 1870’s. It’d sound like magic, not science and technology.
I am 100% convinced we would be vacationing on the moon by this point, if not for white men holding society back.
How many ground breaking achievements were never discovered, because the person who would have discovered it, wasn’t allowed an education, due to their gender/skin tone?
How many avenues in technology and math were closed, because the one who opened the door died, without ever being recognized, because they were the wrong gender/skin tone?
How many places TO THIS DAY make it harder/impossible for certain members of their populace, to receive a proper education?
Yeah, I thought a lot of things would be further along by now. Especially with space travel. I have been following virgin galactic for example since I was 14. Alot has happened and we have made a lot of progress in that whole industry, but 14 year old me would have been thoroughly dissapointed at where we are now.
Gatekeeping resources will have that effect. We as a society are too busy arguing about who deserves human rights and who doesn’t to be able to effectively become more advanced.
We have television phones like they had in The Jetsons.
I am satisfied with that.
I used to think I wanted flying cars too, but then I realized that if everyone drives like total fucking dog shit on the ground, despite the latest and greatest in modern safety features, navigation, and hand-holding babysitting tech, then what mayhem are they going to cause in the fucking air?
And flying cars would probably double both auto and home owners insurance.
Also, I think we are on a path to going too far to achieve the ever evolving idea of the “futuristic world”, as far as AI is concerned. In an IDEAL world, where human corruption is not an issue, AI is a great tool.
But I think the last 10 years has clearly shown that society is too fucking stupid too survive, much less thrive, once the most corrupt elements in society have fully refined and manifested AI for their corrupt goals.
I think the problem is we all watched Star Trek and though about the best case scenario.
What we forgot was how often Scotty was fixing everything.
Our world is very futuristic, technology just sucks to implement. If maintenence and glitches were not a thing, even the cost wouldn’t be much of a problem.
The true way to advance to the future is to get what I call “Stargate tech.” In Stargate they always find some ruin of a technological civilization that’s been chilling for 500 years or more. So like imagine finding a smartphone from today in 500 years, just buried in a ruin.
Then you pick up the phone, turn it on, and it works the same way it worked 500 years ago.
Yeah, until that’s our tech, it’ll never feel like the future, because stuff never works right lol.
I grew up when “video phones” and “tv’s as flat as paintings” were stuff out of 2001: Space Odyssey. Now everybody’s like “my flat screen sucks” and “ugh! I’ve gotta video conference”.
When flying cars come out, it’ll be five years and you’ll hear somebody say “ugh! I have to put on my jetpack and go laser a bunch of alien zombies…again…”
I mean as a kid I def thought we’d have flying cars and those cool bubble space domes by now
realistically though, the last few years have started to feel this way with technology advances, especially a lot of the AI stuff.
I don’t think it’s gonna take over and put everyone out of a job, but it’s still fascinating. There’s a ton of money being wasted in it, but also some really cool applications as well.
Comments
Still waiting for fully self driving cars that do it screw up all the time
I definitely thought by now we’d have flying cars, robot assistants, and food in pill form. Instead, I’m still trying to figure out how to keep my phone from autocorrecting “ducking.”
People who were alive back in 1920
We tell our tv to turn on, and then tell it what we want to watch. Our watches tell us our blood pressure and heart rate. We can video chat with people on the other side of the planet. We sent robots to Mars… What more do you want?
The government are suppressing technology
Going from the promise of the 90s to 9/11 to this… Fuck, man.
I thought VR would’ve caught on more by now
According to Elmo, we were supposed to be colonizing Mars about now. 🤣
We are, but the last Great White Power Grab is trying to turn back the dial.
Not me. I actually thought things were going to regress. Glad I was wrong.
Still waiting for the flying car I was promised in 1982.
As William Gibson said, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
What do you mean? This is exactly like the future in RoboCop.
I feel like I had pretty realistic expectations but Popular Science told me all the cars would be EVs or Hydrogen powered by now and that’s taking a lot longer than I expected although I do drive a plug in hybrid and have for the last 8 years.
I thought we would be living like the Jetson’s.
We live in the future we create. As a whole I don’t see as much creation as I would have thought or expected when I was a kid. It’s sad.
I may have thought that once, but I haven’t thought that again in probably 25 years now.
Also, I don’t think the futurists took into account just how much certain segments of our society would resist it, largely on political and cultural grounds.
I didn’t really expect very much progress. We humans can’t seem to get over our big bad boring selves enough to take steps forward.
I just watched I, Robot and it’s supposed to take place in 2035 and 。。。
I don’t mind a dystopian technocrat state. I just want it to be exciting like cyberpunk. This is just boring and miserable
I think most people’s minds run a little wild with ideas when they see new technology.
We saw that a lot in the 2000s when people were making all these grand ideas about how it’s all going to change the world – and they did, but most people didn’t understand how long it would take.
I think the same goes for AI today, it will have a great impact on us, but a lot of that will be happening 10+ years into the future. We’re essentially seeing a preview where it can help us with simple tasks like optimising our writing, but it’s not necessarily anything critical.
We’re already living that future. It just doesn’t look like what we’ve seen in the movies.
I mean when you think about it we’re living in a crazy future to someone who was living a hundred years ago. We hold the summation of human knowledge in our hands and can communicate with people in radically different cultures at any time. We can exchange ideas at the flick of a finger and take photos with emotion only painters at the time could capture. We treat flying around in giant metal tubes as a mundane and annoying part of life when flight a hundred years ago was still extremely primitive and sort of treated as a fad or frightening. We don’t have flying cars or live in floating cities but we take a lot of the things we have for granted.
I think we will find the “future” arrives at an exponentially rising rate. It will come falling on us. We have only just felt the first several drops at the leading edge of the waterfall so to speak.
The world stays backwards because that’s what makes the people at the top money.
And they’re in the process of taking it even further back to make sure that that system keeps working the way it does as we are discussing the subject here on Reddit.
On Donald Fagen’s (Steely Dan) solo debut there’s a track called I.G.Y. . It was released in the early eighties and the lyrics are basically what he imagined the future to be when he was a child in the fifties. I first heard it in the late nineties and thought the things he sung about would be a reality by now. All we got in the end were the spandex jackets. They’re nice and all but I’d have preferred New York to Paris in 90 minutes.
That Janet Jackson music video made child me think the future would look like flying cars and we would have furniture like the astro furniture from animal crossing. (Song was something about being nutty for you)
I think we’re living in a really futuristic world right now it’s just it’s not like we expected. Sure, we thought we’d get flying cars and all that jazz but I don’t think a lot of us expected the ridiculous advance of LLMs and other AI models, or some of the smaller amazing tech we’ve got used to because we lived the transition. But like, smart appliances, what cellphones can do… I grew up working with TV production and I remember my parents doing non linear video editing which was a whole room and movement endeavour, before linear video editing software became popular and accessible in the late nineties to early 2000s.
Now people can easily and even automatically edit videos with an app on their phone. Wtf.
And there’s the whole “we live in a dystopia” thing too if you wanted something closer to what futuristic novels told you about. It’s just even though it all happened very, very quickly, we also got to live the transition, so we didn’t notice.
I would write stories in the 90’s with what I thought the world would be like, I got door codes instead of keys right -lived at a few places like that but have door keys again now, also knew things like back porch/ garage beer fridges were still gonna be a thing. I clock in with my finger print at work, but I was hoping by now we would be more advance but not heading straight into a dystopian nightmare, I wanted Star trek kind of world.
Boomers were shown programs in the 60s and 70s that depicted a wild future…
…and then they spent the entire adult lives making sure it didn’t happen.
According to Star Trek we have to go through another world war before we get to utopia.
So… seems on track.
We actually aren’t as developed as I would think.
I definitely thought by now we’d have flying cars
I was promised a flying car. Where the heck is my flying car?
And what did I get?
This…….
I feel so lied to
We are. It’s just banal to you. You’re the frog in the pot of boiling water and you can’t tell it’s gotten really hot already.
Right now I’m typing on a thing that even the most creative people in 1990 would think it’s far fetched. A touch screen? Fuckin nuts, the data pads on Star Trek didn’t even do that. Hold up, this thing is also a phone!? You needed a com badge on Star Trek to do that and it only communicated with the ship.
We have cars that drive themselves, computer programs that make sense of images, automated everything. 3D print yourself a gun, buy movie tickets while sitting on the toilet. Pretty much all of this was the realm of fantasy only 20 years ago.
Just because we aren’t wearing silver reflective jackets and riding hover boards doesn’t mean we’re not in a ‘futuristic’ world, just means that we’re easily bored and real life isn’t flashy.
Hanna-Barbera, certainly.
It’s weird watching Star Trek TNG they all have their tablets, though. I was halfway through rewatching the series when it occurred to me how futuristic that seemed in 1990.
We don’t have that badass egalitarianism, though.
Disclosure would fast track this… soon hopefully 😀
I mean, we are. If we were born into a cyberpunk society it wouldn’t feel like the future, it’d feel like the present. You have to compare modern day to the past, and you realize just how futuristic it really is.
Imagine trying to explain the internet to someone from the 1870’s. It’d sound like magic, not science and technology.
I am 100% convinced we would be vacationing on the moon by this point, if not for white men holding society back.
How many ground breaking achievements were never discovered, because the person who would have discovered it, wasn’t allowed an education, due to their gender/skin tone?
How many avenues in technology and math were closed, because the one who opened the door died, without ever being recognized, because they were the wrong gender/skin tone?
How many places TO THIS DAY make it harder/impossible for certain members of their populace, to receive a proper education?
Yeah, I thought a lot of things would be further along by now. Especially with space travel. I have been following virgin galactic for example since I was 14. Alot has happened and we have made a lot of progress in that whole industry, but 14 year old me would have been thoroughly dissapointed at where we are now.
They are in china
Gatekeeping resources will have that effect. We as a society are too busy arguing about who deserves human rights and who doesn’t to be able to effectively become more advanced.
We have television phones like they had in The Jetsons.
I am satisfied with that.
I used to think I wanted flying cars too, but then I realized that if everyone drives like total fucking dog shit on the ground, despite the latest and greatest in modern safety features, navigation, and hand-holding babysitting tech, then what mayhem are they going to cause in the fucking air?
And flying cars would probably double both auto and home owners insurance.
Also, I think we are on a path to going too far to achieve the ever evolving idea of the “futuristic world”, as far as AI is concerned. In an IDEAL world, where human corruption is not an issue, AI is a great tool.
But I think the last 10 years has clearly shown that society is too fucking stupid too survive, much less thrive, once the most corrupt elements in society have fully refined and manifested AI for their corrupt goals.
I think cell phones, self driving cars, drones, AI and Spacex rocket landings are pretty damn futuristic.
I think the problem is we all watched Star Trek and though about the best case scenario.
What we forgot was how often Scotty was fixing everything.
Our world is very futuristic, technology just sucks to implement. If maintenence and glitches were not a thing, even the cost wouldn’t be much of a problem.
The true way to advance to the future is to get what I call “Stargate tech.” In Stargate they always find some ruin of a technological civilization that’s been chilling for 500 years or more. So like imagine finding a smartphone from today in 500 years, just buried in a ruin.
Then you pick up the phone, turn it on, and it works the same way it worked 500 years ago.
Yeah, until that’s our tech, it’ll never feel like the future, because stuff never works right lol.
I grew up when “video phones” and “tv’s as flat as paintings” were stuff out of 2001: Space Odyssey. Now everybody’s like “my flat screen sucks” and “ugh! I’ve gotta video conference”.
When flying cars come out, it’ll be five years and you’ll hear somebody say “ugh! I have to put on my jetpack and go laser a bunch of alien zombies…again…”
I’m GenX. I thought we’d be nuked into oblivion by now. Or killed by holes in the ozone layer or acid rain. 😂
I definitely was, in 2015, and still ten years later, disappointed that we do not yet have hoverboards.
Strangely enough, I think the only realistic depiction of the future EVER has been in the Family Guy movie “Stewie Griffin, the untold story”.
Stewie: What the hell? Everything looks the same?
Future Stewie: Well yeah. We’ve only traveled 30 years into the future.
Somehow, and straight to DVD movie from 2005 nailed it.
It surpassed my expectations ….. I’m 45.
I mean as a kid I def thought we’d have flying cars and those cool bubble space domes by now
realistically though, the last few years have started to feel this way with technology advances, especially a lot of the AI stuff.
I don’t think it’s gonna take over and put everyone out of a job, but it’s still fascinating. There’s a ton of money being wasted in it, but also some really cool applications as well.